Frank Skinner, 55, becomes father for first time to baby Buzz Cody | Daily Mail Online Comedian Frank Skinner is celebrating after becoming a father for the first time at the age of 55. The TV presenter's girlfriend Cath Mason, 43, gave birth to their son Buzz Cody earlier this week. Ecstatic Skinner announced the arrival of the 9lbs tot on his Absolute Radio Show this morning. Baby joy: Frank Skinner and his partner Cath Mason are first time parents to a baby boy called Buzz Cody He told his listeners Buzz was born following an 'exciting 5am drive across London' with comedy agent Mason in the advanced stages of labour. Skinner admitted he had named their son after American astronaut Buzz Aldrin. He said: 'Now I know celebrity types get condemned for giving their babies unusual names. Tribute: Their baby is named after American astronaut Buzz Aldrin 'So this is the name that I went for. He's called Buzz B-U-Z-Z. If you're my age, obviously he's after Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.

For you youngsters listening, yes, it's that puppet from Toy Story.' Skinner admitted he once interviewed Aldrin - the second man to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. He explained: 'He was brilliant. When he walked on stage I actually said to him: "Careful, there's just one small step." He took it very well, I must say. 'His second name is Cody, as in Buffalo Bill Cody, the greatest showman of all time, so I've worked out his career. 'I looked at him, I don't know if many dads do this, but I looked at him, and you know you're supposed to say: "Oh he's so blah-blah." I said: "Oh God, he's going to be so funny when he grows up."' Skinner praised staff at the maternity ward at the London hospital where Buzz was born. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share He continued: 'The great thing about maternity hospitals is that everybody is incredibly used to maternity, whereas obviously when you're in as an individual, especially for your first one, it's a massively life-changing thing. 'Cath was already in mighty labour when we arrived.

We had the exciting five o'clock drive across London with me very worried about her and slightly worried about the upholstery. Fun: The couple in fancy dress at Jonathan Ross's Hallowe'en party in October 2010 'I'm just glad he's out and he's well and his mother is okay and all that.' Skinner announced the news after playing Johnny Mathis's song When A Child is Born, declaring: 'Yes, I am a father.' Skinner revealed his long-term partner Mason was expecting on his radio show in January. The couple started dating in 2003 when she was a receptionist at his management company. He was previously engaged to radio DJ Caroline Ferady before he called it off, and in 2003 he dumped West End showgirl Dannette McLaughlin a month before her 30th birthday.

Inspiration: The baby's middle name comes from William Frederick 'Buffalo Bill' Cody Frank Skinner - Biography - IMDb Frank Skinner Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trivia (17) | Personal Quotes (16) Overview (3) 5' 10" (1.78 m) Mini Bio (1) Frank Skinner was born on January 28, 1957 in West Bromwich, West Midlands, England as Christopher Graham Collins. He is a writer and actor, known for Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned (2000), Frank Skinner Live in Birmingham (1998) and Opinionated (2010). Spouse (1) Trivia (17) Comedian. With David Baddiel he sang the vocals to "Three Lions", the official England song released to celebrate the 1996 UEFA European Championships. The track topped the charts in summer 1996 and an updated version topped the charts in summer 1998 to celebrate England's participation in that year's FIFA World Cup.

Chose the stage name Frank Skinner after a man in his father's pub dominoes team Is a self-confessed alcoholic, hasn't had a drink since September 1987 Is a passionate Elvis fan and purchased one of Elvis' shirt from a US auction for $15,000 Left school with no qualifications and worked in a metal factory. Enrolled in night school and eventually enrolled at University and graduated with a Masters degree in English literature. Was previously an English tutor at Halesowen College in Dudley, England. Won the Perrier Award for Comedy at the Edinburgh festival in 1991, narrowly beating Eddie Izzard . Performed first ever stand up comedy gig at the Portland Club in Edgbaston, Birmingham in 1987 aged thirty. Shared a flat with best-friend and frequent co-presenter David Baddiel for four years. Passionate supporter of West Bromwich Albion (The Baggies) Football Club from the English Premier League. Was awarded the freeman of the borough (for Sandwell, West Midlands) in March 2004. Was brought up in Oldbury, West Midlands which is not far from West Bromwich.

Probably uses West Bromwich as his home town because most people know it for West Bromwich Albion football club and Oldbury is relatively unknown. Plays the Ukulele like his idol, George Formby. Has two brothers called Terry and Keith. Has one sister called Nora. Has a girlfriend called Caroline. Personal Quotes (16) I hate classical music in all its manifestations. [at the Lord Of The Rings premiere] Did I like it? Well, it's like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) but without the jokes. My CD collection has become The Fall and the rest. This is terrible. I've got the new Sigur Rós album, which I really like and I'm thinking, 'this is great, but I could be listening to The Fall '. You know, Chaucer ( Geoffrey Chaucer ) used swearing. It's a very time-honoured language part and shouldn't be ghettoised the way it is just because some people don't like it. I don't want people using so much swearing that there's a blanket ban because there won't be then any room for the clever swearing, the beautiful, eloquent swearing.

So I just think we need to back off on the stuff that's not necessary. But I think it's absolutely important that we keep swearing as a tool, a comic tool for television and any other area of comedy. [on presenting Panorama (1953) in 2009] If you're going to have tennis coverage, you ask Sue Barker . If you're going to have something about offensive material, you ask me. I don't watch cookery programmes. Not because I don't like the swearing, I don't like the cookery. As you get older you get your priorities straight. I don't have children but I have the Albion. I quite like the Germans. They're like us: they drink a lot of beer and they dress badly. And I think we could learn a lot more from them about football than we could from, say, the Italians, whose players are so different from ours. I'll watch it, obviously, but I'd much rather Albion stay up than England win the World Cup. No contest at all. I vote Labour because I have an emotional attachment to my working-class background and I like the idea of being someone who cares about the lowly more than my own tax rate.

Obviously, that wavers but I feel like the moment I vote, I am seeing through that ideal of myself. Frank Skinner on why he can't make his girlfriend of 13 years marry him | Daily Mail Online The millions he lost. The night Eric Clapton saved him from going back on the bottle. Comedian Frank Skinner reveals all to Event ‘I honestly believe I am the funniest person on the planet,' said Frank Skinner In the back room of a Hampstead tea shop, Frank Skinner is in the midst of a modest analysis of his success. ‘I honestly believe I am the funniest person on the planet,’ he says. ‘If I didn’t I wouldn’t be here.’ Skinner may have absolute faith in his abilities as a comic, but in a 26-year career that’s earned him an £8 million fortune, he also knows his life may just as easily have been a car crash had he not pushed himself into a series of reinventions. He went from school drop-out to college lecturer, factory worker to world-conquering comic, hapless drunk to devout and teetotal Catholic.

Today, our conversation encompasses everything from stand-up comedy, where he’s returned with a successful new show, his first in seven years, Man In A Suit (‘It’s romantic, heroic. I see myself as a struggling artist; when I leave a gig I walk out on to the street with a collar upturned and a smouldering look into the distance’) to his ‘loss’ of several million pounds four years ago (‘I wanted to stick all my money in the Post Office, but I trusted the “experts” who pushed me into investments; I should’ve trusted myself’) to one-night stands (‘I’m not Bill Wyman, but I had my fair share’). Now 57, he’s spent two decades at the top of the comedy tree, on the back of stand-up tours, TV appearances and his popular and successful radio and television shows, including Room 101, The Frank Skinner Show and Fantasy Football League, which he hosted with his friend and writing partner, David Baddiel. (There is little he doesn’t know about football. Of England manager Roy Hodgson he says: ‘He reads John Updike and Philip Roth and quotes from Chinese philosophy when he’s commenting on matches.

That is what I want from an England manager.’) He has retained the nothing-to-lose attitude of the working-class misfit who ‘gate-crashed’ his way into fame. Aged 18, his future looked bleak. He’d been expelled from school for selling forged dinner tickets and had started work in a factory making metal parts for aircraft. But he went back into education, fell in love with literature and, after two years on the dole, became a lecturer at Halesowen College in the West Midlands. By this time he was already a heavy drinker. ‘I spent a long time with no money but it never bothered me. I liked being on the dole. I’d drink and read poetry. The day would start with a massive glass of sherry, bloody strong stuff.’ 'David Baddiel is obsessed by my faith (Catholicism),' said Frank Ask him about his drunken exploits and he shrugs: ‘Ending up asleep on a car in the middle of nowhere, wetting beds, waking up covered in cuts and bruises and never remembering what happened the night before.’ He quit drinking when he got ill with flu in 1986, was unable to drink for a week and then realised he could stop.

‘It wasn’t even really a conscious decision, it just happened,’ he says. He admits he still fantasizes about drinking. ‘Even now, when I pass guys sitting on wasteland in the middle of the afternoon with a bottle in their hands I do look at them and know exactly that feeling they have. 'I do still get the appeal. It’s just that I don’t do it any more.’ Eric Clapton stopped him returning to the bottle in 1999. ‘I was on Caroline Aherne’s chatshow and I was talking to her about how I was thinking of having a drink again. A bit later, she offered to let me drink again in a controlled environment where she would be there and make sure everything was safe. ‘And then I got this call from Eric Clapton. It was completely surreal. I didn’t know him at all, but he’d been watching me talking on television and it worried him. 'He is a real patron saint of reformed alcoholics and asked me to meet up. He’s a lovely fellow. 'We hung around for a few months and even more incredibly he invited me to his ‘Dry Millennium’ party on New Year’s Eve.

‘I actually saw in the Millennium standing with my arms around Eric, me singing, him playing the guitar. Who needs drink?’ It was a during a trip to Edinburgh in 1986 that he saw his first stand-up show, and comedy became his new addiction. ‘I watched it and thought, “I could do this.” All my life, people told me I was funny. I was always the little guy with the smart crack, the heckler wanting to be heard. I never thought I couldn’t do it. I just thought: “Why not?” ‘When I did my first gig at a charity night in Birmingham, in 1987, the audience was roaring and I thought the next day I’d be whizzed down to London and put on the telly. I never quite realised it would take a few years.’ When he ‘arrived’ in 1991 on the back of his Perrier Award win (he beat Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard), Skinner was taken by his management to the legendary Christopher’s restaurant in Covent Garden, London. ‘It was my first time in what I’d still call a very posh restaurant,’ he says.

‘I had no idea what to do, what half the things on the menu were. I thought I’d order steak, because that’s what Elvis always ate. And he always ordered it well done. So I asked for steak tartare – well done.’ Frank in his youth, in a photo booth. ‘I spent a long time with no money but it never bothered me. I liked being on the dole. I’d drink and read poetry,' he said He pauses. ‘It wasn’t just the people at my table laughing but all the tables within earshot. Even the waiter was trying not to laugh. It wasn’t laughing with me, it was definitely laughing at me.’ Did he care? He shrugs. ‘A bit. Enough to be embarrassed. But not enough to realise that it was actually pretty funny.’ Born in West Bromwich, Skinner was the youngest of four children. His father John, who died 25 years ago, was a big influence. ‘He was a proper northerner. He drank a lot, he could be incredibly difficult. You didn’t argue with him.

He’d come out with the most bizarre, vivid language, like in the middle of a row with a neighbour he told him he’d rip this man’s dog apart and burst his heart. ‘He was bloody tough. But he read comics to me every week, and he was the first to tell me to get into showbusiness. 'He’d say: “Look at Michael Aspel. He’s got no talent but everyone loves him.” I did get to tell Michael Aspel that several years later, but I don’t think he was very amused. 'Dad was also the one who supported me when I left my job to go to Birmingham Polytechnic [to study English literature]. He understood you had to take chances in life. ‘I’d like to have bought a house for my mum and dad, but both of them died before I got any real success. I wonder if my dad would ever have forgiven me for buying him a house. 'Charlie Chaplin’s dad hated him for doing that, because it removed his power as head of the family. I think about that.’ Skinner thinks a lot. He analyses everything. Like his 13-year relationship with his partner, Cath, who manages young comedy acts.

‘She’s difficult and she says that I’m difficult. We’ve always fought a lot. We split up, got back together again and then a few years ago we went to counselling and that really helped. 'We found ways to resolve rows rather than just walk away, because I never actually wanted to walk away from her. 'I’ve asked her four times to marry me but she keeps turning me down. She doesn’t believe in marriage, but I do. I will keep trying.’ Before settling down with Cath, with whom he has a two-year-old son, Buzz, Skinner enjoyed the bachelor lifestyle that arrived alongside his new-found success. ‘When I first got famous, I went to lots of parties and there were lots of girls. I’ve never exactly been a ladykiller. ‘She’s difficult and she says that I’m difficult,' said Frank of his girlfriend Cath Mason 'In fact, I was always pretty much the exact opposite of that. 'I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 19, and I knew the real attraction was the fact I was on the telly, but to be honest that didn’t bother me. 'I thought it was great that women wanted to sleep with me. ‘I loved being famous.

I’d go to the opening of an envelope because it took a long time for the novelty of free drinks, free food, lots of women, goodie bags and the chance of talking to someone from Emmerdale to wear off. ‘I clearly remember the point it suddenly hit me that I no longer enjoyed that lifestyle. 'I was at a party holding a Vimto talking to Tricky Dicky [Ian Reddington] from EastEnders and I thought: “What am I doing?” 'Then I met Cath and I showed her a documentary called Crumb, about an American cartoonist [the satirical and controversial Robert Crum]. 'It’s weird, obscure and I knew if she loved it then this was the woman I had to spend the rest of my life with. It’s why I could never properly walk away. I love her. 'Our song is Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus and what connects us is that we are these misfits who found each other. And both difficult with it!’ Four years ago, half his fortune was wiped out after investments his advisers put in AIG bombed during the financial crash. ‘It was millions,’ he nods. ‘When I was first told by my accountant I thought I’d lost everything.

I’m rubbish with money and I think I was just in shock. 'I told Cath and she shrugged and said: “It’s not cancer, no one has died. We’ll just move to a smaller house.” Her saying that changed everything. 'It totally put her in perspective, the money in perspective and the fact I still had half of what I’d had meant that I still had more than enough. ‘We moved, but I’ve still got a house in London with a garden. I’ve never been a big spender. I don’t do cars or yachts. I still feel angry that I trusted these advisers. But it’s not everything. 'My accountant says I’m the most frugal man he knows. I don’t care that a lot of other comedians have more money than me. I came from nothing and everything that I have is a bonus.’ Becoming a father at the age of 55 made a far greater impact than the share crash. ‘I’m an old dad,’ he says. ‘I do think, “Why didn’t I do this before?” Maybe I should have. 'I really want more kids, but Cath thinks we’re too old and that it just won’t happen again.

That is a regret, because I love being a dad, but if I only have one child then I’m bloody lucky.’ He intends to raise his son as a Catholic, despite Cath’s refusal to walk down the aisle. ‘No one in the business finds it odd,’ he says of his religion. ‘In fact, generally everyone is pretty fascinated by me going to mass, to confession. David Baddiel is obsessed by my faith. Sadly, he couldn’t be Buzz’s godfather because he’s not a Catholic.’ Baddiel remains one of Skinner’s closest friends. It was Baddiel’s stand-up show at the Edinburgh Festival that set him on his own road to comedy. Five years later, they met at Jongleurs comedy club in Camden and the pair then moved into a flat together in West Hampstead. They began writing and in 1994 came up with the cult show Fantasy Football League. As a double act they held a vice-like grip over the Nineties comedy scene with their brand of laddish humour. Skinner has no plans to follow in his friend’s footsteps in writing children’s books. ‘It’s not something I’ve thought of myself,’ he says.

‘I used to think if you couldn’t write properly then you wrote books for kids. 'I mean, there’s not a lot to the writing in Spot, but it’s a phenomenal success. But David’s books are brilliant.’ Skinner says he won’t stop working, that he is constantly having ideas for shows, books and radio. ‘When I was a kid I felt I was always shouting but never being heard. It wasn’t fame that gave me confidence, it was getting an education, standing up there with my degree. I felt I had a right to be heard. ‘I’m still a misfit,’ he says, as he gets up to leave. ‘I’m just a misfit who has found where he fits.’ e Frank Skinner is touring ‘Man In A Suit’ from November 6. The show is on DVD on December 1. frankskinnerlive.com BBC - Comedy - Frank Skinner Profile Contact Us Frank Skinner Chris Collins played his first gig, in December 1987, at the Birmingham Anglers' Association. As there was already a Chris Collins in Equity, he used the name of a chap on his dad's dominoes team.

Frank Skinner's down-to-earth brand of humour won him the 1991 Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, beating Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard to the prize. Since then he has gone on to become a household name. As talented a stand-up comedian as he is a razor sharp talk show host, Frank Skinner has earned his place at the top of the comedy game. His friendship with David Baddiel produced the Fantasy Football and Unplanned series. But some would say that their ultimate achievement was co-writing and co-singing football song Three Lions which became a favourite on the terraces in the European Championship in 1996.

2000 Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned (Live/TV) 1995 The Frank Skinner Show (TV) 1994 Fantasy Football League (TV) Frank Skinner: 'I’d like to go through a dark night of the soul’ - Telegraph TV and Radio Frank Skinner: 'I’d like to go through a dark night of the soul’ Ahead of hosting a new series of Room 101, Frank Skinner says meditation and confession help him to slay his demons Frank Skinner: 'The priest came out of his box and looked like he was going to hit me' Photo: MARTIN POPE Comments Oh my, Frank Skinner is a funny old fish. I think he might just be the most interesting comedian I have met. He might even be the most interesting man, actually. Because he became really famous in the Nineties, when he released football-cum-national anthem Three Lions, and presented comedy shows about the beautiful game with his best friend David Baddiel, Skinner has a reputation as a total lad and a man of the terraces, a reputation that has stuck to him as firmly as his West Bromwich accent. But there is more to Frank Skinner than football.

To wit: his name isn’t even Frank Skinner. It is Christopher Graham Collins. His parents still call him Graham, but when he was getting into stand-up comedy there was already a Chris Collins registered with Equity, a man who happened to be a singer from Burnley, so the comedian from the West Midlands had to change his name. “My dad had a dominoes team, and there was a Frank Skinner in it,” he explains now. “When I was a kid I used to look at the team card and think it was a brilliant name, so that’s what I went for. I nearly chose West Bromwich, after my football team, but I don’t think we’d be sitting here now if I’d done that.” And the thing about Frank Skinner, as he now refers to himself all the time, is that I’d probably put him down as a man of letters rather than a man of the terraces. He is a committed Catholic, has a masters in English Literature from Warwick University and before he went into comedy full time, he dabbled in the dark art of lecturing.

He recently finished a stint as the President of the Samuel Johnson Society, where he presented to members a paper he had written on Johnson’s Rambler essays, and how they could be used as a self-help book in the 21st century. “People said it was one of the best [talks] they had heard, and I was absolutely chuffed,” he says, beaming. “I have to say, of all the things I have ever done, that is the one I’m most proud of.” We meet in a boardroom that belongs to the production company that makes his latest show, Room 101. The boardroom is very large, and as he sits at the head of the table, cup of tea in hand, he cuts a surprisingly diminutive figure. Skinner will be 56 at the end of this month but he seems to have looked the same way forever. I bet that even when he was a child he had the appearance of a rather middle-aged cheeky chappy. Related Articles Frank Skinner: 'I had a gut feeling about Benefits Street' 24 Jan 2014 Skinner became a father for the first time last year.

Buzz Cody Collins came along in May, and it is like “winning the lottery”. He goes on: “Last night, I was sitting on the sofa with him and he was just handling my face. It was brilliant. When you start, when you first get the baby, you think 'oh man, my heart is melting, I’ve discovered this whole new part of me.’ But then six months on you look back and think 'that was rubbish compared to what I feel now.’” Buzz was baptised recently, which meant Skinner had to explain to the priest that he wasn’t married to Buzz’s mother. He has been with Cath Mason “on and off” for 12 years. “I have asked her to marry me on several occasions, but she won’t. She thinks it would put the jinx on it.” He says that their relationship is 85 per cent brilliant and “15 per cent ----, and I think both of us would worry if that 15 per cent disappeared.

If people say to me that they don’t argue, they drop in my estimation.” He admits that he is quite combative – “not deliberately, not consciously” – which at least partly explains why it has taken him so long to settle down and procreate. “I suppose that every relationship I have been in has had a lot of arguments. I find it very hard to keep things at the bickering level. When I first met Cath she was very passive, but now I’ve trained her up into a champion arguer. Once she’s in a row, she’s in it for the duration, and what she usually does is end the relationship.” She used to do it twice a week, but now it’s only twice a month. “I think she’s got departure fatigue,” he says, wryly. Yet his delayed domesticity can also be put down to finding fame in the Nineties, with shows such as Fantasy Football and Baddiel and Skinner: Unplanned, not to mention the unexpected pop career when Three Lions took off during Euro ’96. Before that, “not being a naturally-good-looking-ladies-man type of bloke, I hadn’t had a tremendous amount of success with women.

So when celebrity opened the door, I went a bit barmy.” He had quite a lot of “one night stands”, as he describes them. “I never kept count. I read somewhere that Bill Wyman has got a record of everyone, with details of what they said and stuff like that. But when does he do that? When they’re having a cigarette, is he, like, 'anyway, I’ll just get me journal out’?” Did Skinner go crazy with booze and drugs as well? “Oh I never did,” he says, shaking his head. “Before I got to be a comic I used to smoke a bit of dope and eat magic mushrooms and then look at a tree trunk for two hours, which felt exhilarating. But when I stopped drinking, I stopped them all.” He gave up alcohol on September 24 1986, which means his sobriety has lasted longer than his comedy career, which will turn 25 this year. Was he an alcoholic? “I’ve never…” he pauses. “I think, um. I did used to drink sherry for breakfast. And then I switched to Pernod. And after a bit I thought, 'this is quite bad – drinking Pernod’.

It never occurred to me when I was drinking sherry that it also [might be a problem]. I mean, there’s something very English and middle class about sherry. But then what I had was what they called 'loose sherry’. It was sold at the grocer’s. You used to go with your own bottle and they’d fill it up. I’ve no idea what brand it was, but it did the trick. I used to keep the sherry on the bedside table, so when my hand came out in the morning…” He still dreams about alcohol. “When I wake up I always have a few seconds of 'oh my God, I’ve broken my thing’,” he says. “I dream about it once a fortnight.” He was 29 when he gave up, and it was at about that time that he returned to the Catholicism he had abandoned as a 17-year-old – “because when you’re 17 everything is dull and wrong”. He says that being a Catholic is “profoundly uncool. I did a tour of Sweden with Eddie Izzard in our early days, and he said, 'I’m thinking of talking about being a transvestite on stage.

You should talk about being a Catholic.’ I said, 'I think audiences will be more accepting of you being a transvestite than me being a Catholic.’ But you know, I don’t need it to be cool, I just like it. It seems to make sense to me. Sometimes I sit there [in mass] and I think: 'This is 2012, and we’re sitting in this big ornate building, and there’s a man holding up a wafer and saying it is the blood and flesh of someone who died 2,000 years ago.’ It’s quite exciting. It’s like a film.” He picks his masses carefully. He favours a church in Mayfair, because “it looks beautiful and you tend to get a pithy and interesting homily”, but he also likes Westminster Cathedral, though he stopped going for a while, “because I had a bit of an incident in confession. I went in and started talking about the previous confession, and the priest said, 'I don’t want to hear about your last confession, just tell me your sins will ya?’. I thought: 'Wooah, I’m leaving,’ and he actually came out of the priest’s box.

He said, 'GET BACK IN THAT BOX,’ and looked like he was going to hit me. But otherwise I like confession. It’s like having a really good cleanse.” Skinner meditates, too. “I absolutely believe that it’s a brilliant thing for living your life. It doesn’t have to be about joss sticks.” He’d like to live in solitude, like a monk. “I’ve heard that if you completely cut off contact for three weeks, the first two weeks will be nightmarish but in the third you will find clarity. I like the idea of going through the dark night of the soul and then ending up the other side of it.” He stops, nods to himself. Some might say Frank Skinner has made that journey already. The new series of 'Room 101’ begins on BBC One on Friday at 8.30pm Frank Skinner on the Road : Frank Skinner : 9780099458036 Humour Review quote "I cannot recall a book that so entertainingly lays bare the neediness, self-consciousness and weirdness of the professional comic's life.

His one-liners are immaculate, too" Daily Telegraph "Skinner is insightful, erudite and, naturally, funny when dissecting the craft of writing and performing successful stand-up comedy" Esquire "He manages to provide a fascinating insight into the world, and the insecure mind, of a stand-up comedian ... This is a real, honest account of life on the road. And you can't expect more from a tour diary than that" Chortle "Quite possibly the best book about stand-up ever written" GQ "A minor masterpiece" The Guardian show more About Frank Skinner Frank Skinner performed his first stand-up gig in December 1987, and four years later went on to win the prestigious Perrier Award. Frank has established himself as a major name in entertainment - both in live comedy and on television. Frank has created and starred in a succession of hit comedy shows, including The Frank Skinner Show, Fantasy Football and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. Frank has attained three number one hits with the iconic football anthem Three Lions alongside David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds.

He has starred in the West End in both Art and Lee Hall's Cooking with Elvis; and his critically acclaimed first book Frank Skinner was the bestselling autobiography of 2002, spending a total of 46 weeks in the Sunday Times bestsellers' list. In 2007 Frank Skinner returned to stand-up with another sell-out tour of the UK. show more Review Text "I cannot recall a book that so entertainingly lays bare the neediness, self-consciousness and weirdness of the professional comic's life. His one-liners are immaculate, too" Daily Telegraph show more Follow us New father Frank Skinner explains baby's unusual name - ITV News 26 May 2012 at 1:46pm New father Frank Skinner explains baby's unusual name Frank Skinner is feeling the buzz of fatherhood for the first time. Photo: PA Wire Comedian Frank Skinner is feeling the buzz of fatherhood for the first time after his girlfriend gave birth to their son, he said today.

The 55-year-old broadcaster shared the happy news with listeners of his Absolute Radio show , saying of the 9lb baby: "He's going to be so funny when he grows up." His son, born this week after an "exciting 5am drive across London" with partner Cath Mason in the advanced stages of labour, has been named Buzz Cody. Explaining the choice of names, Skinner said: "Now I know celebrity types get condemned for giving their babies unusual names. "So this is the name that I went for. He's called Buzz B-U-Z-Z. If you're my age, obviously he's after Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. For you youngsters listening, yes, it's that puppet from Toy Story." He added that he had met the astronaut, saying: "Buzz was definitely interesting - I interviewed Buzz once and he was brilliant. "When he walked on stage I actually said to him: 'Careful, there's just one small step'. He took it very well, I must say. "His second name is Cody, as in Buffalo Bill Cody, the greatest showman of all time, so I've worked out his career.

"I looked at him, I don't know if many dads do this, but I looked at him, and you know you're supposed to say: 'Oh he's so blah-blah'. I said: 'Oh God, he's going to be so funny when he grows up'." Skinner announced the news after playing the Johnny Mathis classic When A Child is Born on his show before saying: "Yes, I am a father." Last updated Thu 14 Jun 2012 The Frank Skinner Show by Absolute Radio on iTunes by Viaccess I have long been a Frank Skinner fan. He may not make you split your side with laughter, but he has a quick wit and his observations are often spot on and very funny. His co-presenters are not in his class, but it's unfair (as one reviewer seems to have done) to dismiss them as being irritating. They are decent 'feeds' helping Frank to provide the meat of the show - and most importantly knowing when to shut up and leave the platform to the Star. In addition, there have been some very good guests over the last few weeks. This is a free podcast, so you cannot criticise the value for money!

I would pay for this if it were not given away for nothing. If you haven't yet heard the Show, do yourself a favour and subscribe. It could be so much better. by Squeaker Paul Poor Frank, having taken on the job of presenting a radio show he’s landed with ‘co-presenter’ Emily Dean, and to bounce ideas off stand-up comedian Gareth. A Podcast with Frank Skinner in…. Great stuff…until that is Emily’s non-stop totally irritating false laugh is heard. No matter what Frank says or does Emily just has to find it funny and just ruin it. A co-presenter, did she climb up through local radio and was then snapped up for her presenting skills? Or is this a case of nepotism…or maybe ‘celebrity’ parents helping out. As for stand-up comedian Gareth…. I’d pay good money to see him live…and then ask for a refund on the way out. Poor, poor Frank what a waste. Have a listen to Jonathan Ross to see how it should be done. No wonder they didn’t get them to go head to head at the same time slot…Ross would trounce Frank.

Only a three-month radio contract for Frank, I can’t see it being extended until changes are made, and if Emily “Mummy and Daddy…I want to work in the media business” gets her own radio show or becomes ‘famous’ in any way shape or form then there truly is something wrong with the world. Her voice will drive you mad!!! Frank Skinner review by Polly V Love it and totally disagree with other reviewers that the co-presenters detract... it's a show, not stand up. Frnak's brilliant, of course he is, we already know that... but without the other two, it wouldn't work as a radio show, would it? Especially love Emily Dean, how often do you hear a girl on the radio being that sharp and funny? Not just a drivelling sycophant or piece of fluff... nice to hear a woman with an opinion and a real sense of humour given air space. But I think the three of them together really work, nicely balanced

Question: What is comedian Frank Skinner's real name?
Answer: Christopher Graham Collins